The Northumberland coast creates a harder version of the stock planning problem than most independent retailers face. A shop in Seahouses or Bamburgh might see sixty or seventy percent of its annual footfall in a ten-week summer window. Order too light and the summer revenue leaks away through stockouts. Order too heavy and the stockroom carries dead stock through a long quiet winter. An outdoor kit shop we looked at near Alnwick was doing both at the same time: running out of walking gear and waterproofs at peak season while carrying two seasons of unsold gift lines that were gradually being marked down and eventually written off. The buyer was experienced and knew her suppliers well. The problem was not knowledge, it was the arithmetic.

We build a forecasting set-up that sits alongside the EPOS rather than replacing it. It lines up two years of weekly sell-through data and produces a reorder recommendation per SKU that accounts for the lead times and minimum orders of each supplier. For the coastal shops with a hard seasonal peak, the model weights the pre-season order against what actually sold last time rather than against a rough estimate. The buyer reviews the suggested list each week and overrides wherever she knows something the model does not. Over a full season, the more accurate pre-loading and tighter in-season reorders tend to cut waste on slow movers and lift availability on the lines visitors are actually looking for.

Farm shops across Northumberland are working with a mixture of their own production, local suppliers and regional wholesalers, and no two send price or allergen information in the same format. The independents in Alnwick and Hexham are managing product data for forty or more of these accounts. The coastal village shops are doing it on a small team with no dedicated admin support. In every case the data work comes home with the owner, gets done after the shop closes, and produces enough small errors that they surface occasionally in a customer complaint or a mismarked shelf.

We build tools that read supplier price files however they arrive, match them against the product master, and flag changes and new lines ready to import into the EPOS and the website. Allergen data and provenance statements are pulled from supplier documents without manual copying. Nothing goes live without the owner reviewing it first. Recovered time typically settles at six to ten hours a week, and the product-data errors that used to surface at the shelf edge largely stop within the first month.

Independent owners across Northumberland all run some version of the Monday morning trading review, but most of them are running it on Sunday evening. What sold over the weekend, what needs to be reordered, what is sitting too long. The thinking is quick. The data gathering is slow, because the EPOS, the website and the loyalty platform each have to be opened and reconciled by hand. A Morpeth high-street retailer with around fifty active SKUs was spending Sunday afternoons on this week in, week out, not because it was complicated but because there was no other way to do it.

We build tools that pull the weekly trading picture together automatically overnight. The draft markdown or promotion suggestion is in the owner's inbox on Monday morning, based on sell-through and stock age. She checks the flags, adjusts for anything she knows that the model does not, and signs off. What used to take most of Sunday afternoon becomes around twenty minutes before opening on Monday. Markdown decisions tend to sharpen when they are made on the numbers at the start of the week.